Description
Performance versus Scalability
Performance is how quickly your webpages load, Scalability is how many simultaneous users you can have on your website without crashing.
Scalability Pro focuses on Scalability, so it’s not touching the front-end JavaScript or CSS.
However, the primary technique to improve scalability is to fix performance so that it does not degrade as your site grows.
This means that if you already have a large website, you will see a big performance boost by using Scalability Pro.
How we make WordPress scalable
- Makes WP_Query lightning fast (0.4 seconds uncached vs over 180 seconds for 820,000 products on /shop/ page)
- Works by optimising your underlying database and queries and eliminating table scans
- Provides options to alter or remove slow WooCommerce and WordPress features
- Complements caching systems perfectly
- Speeds up SLOW queries – install the Query Monitor plugin and view your slowest pages, if you see slow queries being reported, Scalability Pro will help. If you instead see thousands of queries occurring, you probably need our Super Speedy Filters plugin too.
- It adds indexes to your key WordPress tables to help optimise underlying SQL queries
- It alters database queries to make them more efficient, avoiding table scans
- It provides options to disable, alter or microcache slow WordPress/WooCommerce/Import functionality
If Scalability Pro is implemented and there are still table scans occurring, we will fix them.
Five Key problem areas for Scalability
Scalability Pro helps speed up your main slow queries, adding indexes to tables and rewriting queries to use them. But it can’t do everything on its own.
If you install the free Query Monitor plugin and view your slow pages, you’ll see one or more of these causes.
Slow queries as your site gets bigger
This is what Scalability Pro helps with. It makes slow queries run quickly when your site is bigger. Some slow filtering and search queries cannot be optimised by Scalability Pro.
If the slow query uses WP_Query, Scalability Pro can optimise it.
Too many queries
This problem most often comes from badly coded search or filtering plugins. The Redis object cache sometimes helps with this a bit, but we recommend you check out our Super Speedy Search and Super Speedy Filters plugins.
Too much RAM and CPU consumption in PHP
In Query Monitor, you’ll see low SQL time, low numbers of queries, but long page generation time and large RAM usage.
If you order queries by row-count, you’ll find some queries that return large row counts, often over 5000 rows even though there are not 5000 items displayed on your page.
The offending plugin on your site is filling PHP objects with those 5000 rows on every page load. Often, this can be fixed by implementing an object cache – but it depends on the type of data.
We’ve seen WOOF filters do this kind of bad-behaviour on numerous client sites once they get more than a couple of thousand items.
Slow API or ajax calls
Your site may be using ajax, or it may be calling third-party APIs. Scalability Pro has a big upgrade coming soon to transform the speed of ajax calls from many third-party plugins.
Poor hosting
Make sure you get a good quality hosting stack. PHP 7, MySQL 8, or MariaDB, nginx or Litespeed, redis in-memory-only and a proper configuration.
WPI Scalability Pro is the core WP Intense plugin to transform the speed and scalability of your WordPress site. You’ll never have limits on how big your site can become, how many visitors you can have, how many orders you can receive or how many items you can import ever again.
A scalable site will not slow down as your site gets bigger. Without WPI Scalability Pro, you’ll see a degradation of performance on your website once you exceed 5,000 products, orders or users. Caching can help, but what you really need is to make sure your website scales, regardless of how big your website becomes. A scalable website is as fast at generating a web page when there are 1,000,000 posts as it is when there are 10,000 posts.
WP Intense are ‘Speed Junkies’
We’ve been called many things, but our favourite is ‘Speed Junkies’. Our founder, Dave Hilditch, transformed the scalability and speed of Skyscanner (a billion dollar website now!) and now focuses on making WordPress the fastest CMS on the planet.
Scalability Pro Makes WordPress Scale
Scalability Pro makes your WordPress website scale. That means, it won’t slow down no matter how large your site becomes. It also means, if you have a large slow site right now that you can get vastly improved performance simply by activating Scalability Pro and configuring it with a few clicks.
Scalability Pro Transforms Import Speeds
Depending on how large your imports are, you’ll get phenomenal improvements in import speed. We optimise item-lookup to make it instant for importing tools to decide whether to update or insert an item, and we defer term-counting so that the expensive operation of counting items per category is done at the end of the import, not once per row.
Typically, users see something in the region of a 10-fold speed boost in their imports, along with reduced CPU usage while importing which means your users are no longer negatively affected by simply updating your products with your import.
Scalability Pro is Regularly Updated
We perform regular performance optimisation jobs for clients, and as part of that subsidised deal we add optimisations directly into the plugin so everyone can benefit.
View our changelogs to see all the updates
Proof that we know what we’re doing
Here is a selection of in-depth case studies where optimisations ended up inside Scalability Pro:
- Speeding up imports
- Theme Speed boosts
- General Speed boosts
- Optimising XML Sitemaps
- Optimising Yith Wishlist
Support is Incredible
We have an active and growing Discord server for all customers where you can come ask any questions you have and get help for anything you need.
Scalability Pro is a ‘Must-have plugin’
Our plugin works wonders on WordPress and WooCommerce scalability and performance, but don’t take our word for it, take our customer’s word.
If you wish to see the Facebook group chat for yourself, here are a couple of links:
- WPI Customers advising someone to get Scalability Pro (WooCommerce Community Group)
- People responding to a Scalability Pro import-speed upgrade (WordPress Speed Up Group)
Scalability Pro Demo
You can see the speed of a demo/dev site here on a $20 per month Digital Ocean server with NO page-caching enabled. It has almost 1 million products, but it is also our test bed for plugin alterations so you may see the style and features available on the demo changing – also, please forgive the missing images on many products, not plugin-related:
https://www.foundthru.com/shop/
Please note that the above shop also has our Super Speedy Filters and Super Speedy Search plugins activated. You can buy all three of these plugins together at one low price in our Super Speedy Plugin Pack.
What Can’t Scalability Pro Do?
WPI Scalability Pro is a true must-have plugin for speed, scalability and growth, but there are some things it cannot do.
It won’t fix your hosting
It cannot fix your hosting. If you have bad hosting, you can follow our latest stack building guide.
It won’t fix your slow WooCommerce filters
Every WooCommerce filters plugin we’ve tested is badly coded when it comes to performance and scalability. It’s too complicated inside a single plugin to fix all of those issues for other filtering plugins, so instead we’ve created our own filtering plugin. If you have slow WooCommerce filters then you need WPI Faster Woo Widgets.
It won’t fix 1000s of product variations
1000s or 100,000s of product variations leads to slow product detail pages and slow archive pages where those products exist. We cannot optimise these because technically the queries are fast – the slow part is that Product Objects are created and stored for each variation and this uses PHP CPU and RAM. There are options to improve this:
- Use an object cache – an object cache allows these PHP built objects to be reused again wherever they appear on your site. Redis or Memcached are good choices. If your hosts can’t help, move to better hosts who understand these basics.
- Use Product Rules – often, variations end up being used because they are a default feature of WooCommerce when Product Rules would have been better. If choosing an option for a product changes the price by a consistent price – e.g. Option A adds £10 – then Product Rules can be used and you can eliminate 1000s of variations.
- Use Product Addons – if particular options are available across all variations, these can be created as Product Addons. For example, Gift Wrapping, Engraving and more can be addons rather than variations.
You may already have benefitted from our work
We regularly submit code optimisations to other plugin and theme creators so they can speed up their creations. If you use the Yoast Sitemaps or the Yith Wishlist plugin amongst others you have probably benefited from our work in the past.
We’re trying to improve performance and scalability across the board, but by owning WPI Scalability Pro you get these optimisations first and you get our incredible support to help with your specific issues.
Never worry about WordPress performance or scalability again!
We’re speed junkies. We hate slow. We regularly provide performance optimisations to other plugin developers, but by making the smart choice to buy Scalability Pro you will never have to worry about performance again. Grow your WordPress site with no limits, no worries, and focus on your business – let us focus on performance and scalability.
Frequently Asked Questions
What payment methods do you accept?
We accept payments using PayPal, Stripe and bank transfer. You can pay with any credit or debit card using either PayPal or Stripe, but we’ve included both options since we know some of you have a preference.
If paying with bank transfer, we accept EUR, USD and GBP and bank transfer details are provided at checkout.
How good is your support really?
We pride ourselves in providing the best support on the market, but you don’t need to take our word for this!
Visit each plugin page to see our reviews and, if that’s not enough, visit our Discord server where you can see our customers getting instant responses.
And there is NO EXTRA CHARGE FOR SUPPORT!
How often are the plugins updated
We are on a mission to make all of our plugins best-of-breed and so naturally we are releasing updates for our plugins daily – you can see updates in our change logs.
We develop our plugins against a 1,000,000 product WooCommerce demo store so you can rest assured that our plugin updates will not slow your site down.
We believe in customer-driven development – we have a development channel for each plugin on our Discord Server where we discuss feature upgrades with our customers.
How fast and big can WordPress sites really be?
We have many clients with 100,000+ products or posts (including CPTs), clients with 100,000+ users, and quite a few with over 1,000,000 products.
With our plugins and our guidance, there is no limit to how big your WordPress site can be – all while delivering pages in sub-second uncached speed.
If you join us as a customer at WP Intense you will never have to worry about WordPress performance ever again!
Is there a free trial option?
We are currently working on creating a free trial option for Scalability Pro, Super Speedy Search, Super Speedy Filters and External Images. These will become available towards the end of November 2022.
In the meantime, we have a 60-day money back guarantee.
How unlimited is the unlimited site license?
You can install these plugins on as many websites as you like. You can even install the plugins on websites you build for your clients and your clients don’t need to get their own license.
However, if you love us, we’d prefer for you to give your clients your affiliate coupon and get them to sign up for a single-site yearly license so we can continue to grow and build more awesome features, and so that your clients can have their own support account.
Our lifetime deals will no longer be available for purchase after November 2022, so if you’re considering buying a lifetime deal you should buy now!
The yearly unlimited site deals will always be available.
Can I upgrade after purchase?
Yes, you can upgrade for the difference in price within 3 months of purchase. You’ll find an upgrades section in your account area with your various upgrade options. For example, if you purchase Scalability Pro 1 year 1 site license, you can upgrade to Scalability Pro 1 year unlimited, Scalability Pro LTD or any of the Super Speedy Packs.
Do you offer refunds?
Yes, we offer a 60 day money back guarantee. Let us know within 60 days and we’ll refund you using the same payment method from your initial purchase. We kindly ask you to optionally let us know your reason for refund so we can improve our products.
Do you have an affiliate program?
We provide a referral/affiliate program for all customers so you can share your love of our plugins with others. In your account area, you’ll find a unique discount coupon that gives people 10% off our plugins and rewards you with a 10% affiliate fee.
How do I post a question on the Discord Server?
Visitors to our Discord Server can view and chat in most channels.
Once you are a customer you will get elevated permissions to post in all development channels.
We also have a superuser program where customers who go above and beyond in helping us develop our plugins get their own channel with a prioritised response rate.
Jaime M. (verified owner) –
Use it to speed up you WP All Import and Woocommerce shop!
Mihai L. (verified owner) –
Recommend Scalability Pro if you have a lot of products and use wpallimport or wpallexport, improve import and export and also speed up your website.
Alessandro T. (verified owner) –
Dave made it right, we had express speed up in admin area. I almost gave up with woocommerce, but after this speed up we can definitely work smoothly. Thanks Dave
Dave H. –
Thank you for your kind review, we’ve worked hard on speeding up wp-admin. Got more speed boosts coming too for edit.php to make it even faster!
Silver P. (verified owner) –
Well. Very long story in short format.
I set up site for my client. All products are imported via XML / JSON from different wholesale warehouses. At the moment 26k total products / 18k in stock. With over 10k products and with Divi theme site started to slow down. Divi itself is quite heavy at these level because of per post / taxonomy templates and generating static assets per post / tax. Even if these Divi side optimizations are turned off, site is quite slow. So we started testing. Keep in mind – we had frontend assets optimized so LCP / FCP etc metrics were on par with that kind of structure. Biggest problem was on backend. For Google / GTMetrix it meant TBT (total blocking time) or as I understand – time for server to return data – that was around 12 seconds. Turned off Divi “performance” we got it 3 seconds down but still over 8 seconds.
So, here comes Scalabilty Pro. At first it was like – meh, i get it down to 3 seconds. Store became usable. More or less. But after wee bit tweaking and testing, combining with Perfmatters and WP Rocket – at the moment we sit TBT 10ms dektop / 10-700ms mobile. And we can use page preloading again which previously clogged down DB.
So, SSP only with indexes did a miracle on a site. With other tweaks admin pages are usable and site mostly works faster than small static pages.
And this all runs on shared web hosting at zone.ee server.
In another hand – Dave is awesome. Very fast support on Discord – explain problem and soon you have a solution.
Jeroen Biliet –
I’m super happy with this plugin!
We went from 30s product page load to 1s, which is marvelous for a product with 800+ variations.
One big reminder for myself and tip for others : LOG OUT OF WP-ADMIN!!! Being logged in also show the private and unpublished posts, which doesn’t give the plugin the chance to show its use!
David G. (verified owner) –
I have been using Scalability Pro for a good few years now with no complaints. It’s a great plugin and has lots of great little optimisation settings that can really boost your speed on both the front and backend of your site. Our backend was getting really slow and would even crash sometimes when using it. Scalability Pro has helped with this tremendously.
The Discord server is very active and provides helpful and fast support too.
Konstantinos L. (verified owner) –
If you work seriously with woocommerce the most important things, that in each stage (development, launch, maintenance) gives you headaches are website-speed and performance.
Since my programming skills are not really great, I needed performance and filter plugins for my websites, which are not only fast, but also easy to add and use.
That’s why I took the risk and purchased the lifetime-performance-bundle superspeedy search, filters and scalability pro.
That’s it – much less headaches!
Thank you
Dave H. –
Thank you very much for your kind words! Glad to ease your performance pains.
Stephen O. (verified owner) –
Great plugin and great support thank you
Shawn T. (verified owner) –
Our current WP websites have been really laggy and despite switching to more powerful servers, we kept encountering bottlenecks until we found WPI.
We are currently using Super Speedy Search + Scalability Pro and it has been phenomenal with the performance improvements!
Across 2 of our websites on 1 server, we are looking at 90k MAU with 6k products total.
Dave has also been a great help with any bugs during the setup process – really speedy response and he sure knows what he is doing!
Daniel A. (verified owner) –
The plugin improved category loading and page display from over 15 seconds to 2 seconds instantly. Over 250,000 products on WooCommerce. The other pages are the same, this can be seen immediately, especially when there are more products on the page
Jay M. –
Super happy with Scalability Pro, the support, and the results – sped up my imports by multiples.
I first came across Dave and his work speeding up large WordPress/WooCommerce sites by watching his Wordcamp presentation on scaling Woocommerce – before he had this official plugin. Having all of that expertise distilled into a plugin, it’s pretty amazing and the results speak for themselves. A+++++
Rik E. (verified owner) –
Today put this tool on my website with 50,000+ products. The page loading times were really 10 to 20 seconds during imports via wpallimport. Set all steps and go through and now around 1 to 2.
What a great tool 🙂
Dave H. –
Thank you! This plugin was built for large stores or large blogs, so it’s really great to hear from happy customers.
Zaid I. (verified owner) –
BAD WEBSITE, BAD SUPPORT, BAD PLUGINS
I purchased the plugin, then I’ve installed it on my website and it did not do anything, literally nothing.
I’ve tried to contact the support and I did not receive any reply, Also I’ve tried to request a refund and no one contacted me.
This is a lie, be careful. DON’T DEAL WITH THIS WEBSITE.
Dave H. –
I’m never happy to hear about unhappy customers – I’m really sorry it didn’t speed things up for you.
Here’s a guide explaining what each of the plugins do:
https://www.wpintense.com/2018/06/30/wordpress-performance-quick-start-guide/
As for contacting us – please use the Q&A through the site and you will get a response – I don’t see any questions from you. I do not reply to email questions any more if that’s where you tried to contact me. This was an intentional decision to eliminate the vast number of questions I used to answer in private – now other customers can benefit from the questions and answers.
You can see my blog article discussing this here:
https://www.wpintense.com/2020/12/07/december-development-update/
If you are really in a rush, you can contact me through facebook, but if it’s a general question I’ll still ask you to ask the question through our Q&A system.
For refunds – email [email protected]
I just looked through my emails and I see that your site crashed when you were creating the indexes – this is almost certainly due to your server running out of disk space. The indexes don’t take up too much extra space on your disks, but they do need some free space in order to be created.
John Black –
Hello!
I have a wordpress e-commerce website and woocommer. My website has about 100k products x 288 variants. And recently, I often don’t have access to line items. So does your plugin optimize that? Thank you very much!
Dave H. –
Yes, if you install Query Monitor, you’ll see a slow main query – it optimises those primarily. For the variations you should add Redis object cache – see my stack building guide: https://www.wpintense.com/2018/10/20/installing-the-fastest-wordpress-stack-ubuntu-18-mysql-8/
savvas z. (verified owner) –
I can’t praise enough this plugin. It helped me scale my woocommerce site. Importing products now it’s a breeze! Scalability pro cut the importing time to half (i am also using external images). Also my site loads much much faster than previously! Next stop: super speedy search and faster woo widgets.
If you want to scale your woocommerce site don’t miss Dave’s plugins. They are a must.
Thanks Dave
Joseph M. –
It took me almost a year to find this plugin. I can truthfully say it is without question a must have if you have any intensions of scaling woocommerce. Not to mention awesome support the few issues I had because of my theme were taken care of by Dave himself. Not only did he fix the small issues with my theme he took the time via my request to touch up my database while he was in there. Thank again I am thankful for your help and putting up with my relentless questions. Utmost respect – joe miller
cory d. (verified owner) –
This plugin is brilliant!!! Would give it 10 stars if I could. Brought the site loading times down to less than 2 seconds – was sitting at about 10 seconds before. Had a few problems with the configuration but the support was great and got me setup in no time. I highly recommend this plugin.
Harris –
Works very well, noticeable results immediately.
Paul A. –
My client site has about 10k products variations. Page loading time was around 10s, and by adding this plugin and doing a quick setup by following the guide, the WooCommerce pages now load in 2s. Still a bit more tweaking to do on my side with a few different options, but this plugin took my client site from being useless (yes a 10s load time for product pages renders your site useless!) to very useful 😉
Thanks for the great plugin and support!
Anon –
Thanks Paul. It’s great to hear your feedback and I’m glad the plugin helps a lot. There’s more coming soon to shave more milliseconds off those page load speeds. In particular, I’ll be focusing on WP_Term_Query optimisations which are probably what are taking up the last of your slow load. (I consider 2s to still be slow)
Abhishek J. (verified owner) –
I bought the plugin a month back and I was impressed by Dave’s support, he is really knowledgeable. I had a product database of around 300k products which is also using wp-allimports custom fields functionality which made my postmeta database comprising of about 50 million rows.
Pros:
– This plugin creates indexes and has options to fix edit page issue in admin panel – I received when before, but when I started using scalability pro, it fixed it.
– My page load time for different categories decreased from 30 seconds to around 20 seconds with products around 100k which is great- all thanks to indexes created by the plugin
– Good support from Dave(the plugin was not working on my website, but Dave did do all the work manually on my website and recommended me a lot of stuff)
Cons:
– Scalability Pro is I think at its initial stages and it will improve gradually. Different theme support and good service in future can sustain. The reason I’m listing this is because when I started using this plugin, my product database tripled, but it was fixed with in 2 days by Dave when I told him, so if you’re having high traffic I would recommend to test it on your test site before making it live.
– It won’t necessarily solve all the problems, I still can’t use filters on Products section(where I can see all the products) in wp-admin section, so you will be using it like a usual customer only or if you’re technical you can go to MySQL database, see your products. It should have solved this problem
– Filters provided by scalability pro don’t work, I have raised issue with Dave but not fixed yet. Filters also don’t support wp_postmeta fields or custom fields. I really don’t like to message him for everything, it should have been solved.
– I think search still doesn’t use Match .. Against(default wordpress search) or as a matter of fact on any pages.. I analysed it using query monitor but it still seems to use Like only. No support for custom fields. Other problem is created by wp_postmeta table(as all the extra fields related to product are in wp_postmeta) Wp_posts table is not that big a deal, as only 1 row is created per product while in wp_postmeta around 16-20 rows are created per product, so either you’ll have to write custom search. If custom search was there with this plugin, you could really see performance improvements in your site(I’m not ignoring the performance improvements but they are not noticeable for me as my search dependence is on wp_postmeta table and category page loads under 20 seconds, which should have been under 2 seconds). Dave talked about releasing beta version for custom search but still isn’t released yet.
I am waiting for updates on this plugin and hopefully errors I listed will be solved in future. All in all I would recommend to go with this plugin, it will offer you useful insights about your website and hopefully if you’re a wordress programmer, you can solve those or if you aren’t, you can always hire Dave or other programmer.
This plugin offered me a ray of hope that I don’t have to discard my wordpress website and go with Magento(if you read it on stackoverflow, everyone would recommend agianst wordpress for products with large database). If you’re programmer or your programmer can understand the way plugin works and take it from there instead of relying on Dave, this is great product.
Thanks
Anon –
Hi – thanks for the detailed review.
Regarding missing filters – there was a bug introduced in the last version which caused this error on some setups, to do with adding the manual sorting functionality.
A fix has been coded up and is ready to be deployed, I’m just adding compatibility with the WooBrands plugin before I deploy.
re: Match against search (instead of like) this functionality was removed from Scalability Pro and has been added to a separate plugin called Super Speed Search which everyone who has purchased Scalability Pro to date will get for free. This new plugin is almost ready and is so fast that the search results update using ajax as you type (tested on 800,000+ product reference site).
Sorry about the delay with these releases – I’ve been working on making super speedy search as compatible as possible with as many themes as possible.
Aaron M. (verified owner) –
Our website over at nyde.co.uk was under development and suffering from a complete slowdown. I purchased Scalability Pro in the hope that it would give things a much needed boost, but didn’t expect the results to be quite as brilliant as they were. Dave worked with me to configure the plugin and also identified numerous bottlenecks on my website. The improvement is unbelievable! Really pleased with my purchase and I couldn’t recommend Scalability Pro or working with Dave on performance enhancements enough.
Istvan D. (verified owner) –
The Scalability Pro plugin and Dave’s support is simply amazing! I was struggling with 30+ seconds load times on my shop and the plugin alone has reduced this under 3 seconds. Wow! This plugin and generally everything around WPIntense is absolutely recommended!
Erik D. (verified owner) –
I have a site with many products and heard about Scalability Pro and after installing this plugin my site got blazing fast.
I recommend this anytime for everybody who want fast woocommerce site.
Thanks to Dave for support.
Dirk (verified owner) –
I ordered the WPI Performance Plugin and I´m absolutly impressed. I never thought that I can get that speed on my site. I´m planing to build more sites and shure I will buy the WPI Performance Plugin for that sites too.